Posted on 03/20/2006 2:12:01 PM PST by restornu
Wings could be a passing phase for the giant prickly stick insect
The big wing switchThe lowly stick insect has forced a rethink of one of the key rules of evolution - that complex anatomical features do not disappear and reappear over the course of time.
Researchers have discovered that on a number of occasions in the past 300 million years, stick insects have lost their wings, then re-evolved them. Entomologists have described the revelation as "revolutionary".
Michael Whiting, an evolutionary biologist from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his team stumbled upon the finding while examining the DNA of 37 different phasmids, the stick and leaf insects famous for camouflaging themselves against plants, in a bid to work out their family tree.
Entomologists have assumed that wings only evolved once in insects. The received wisdom is that a winged ancestor produced the winged phasmids we see today. The 60 per cent of stick insects that do not sport wings will, this thinking goes, have jettisoned them along their evolutionary journey so they could expend more energy on reproduction and less on flying.
But Whiting's analysis shows that the very first stick insect, which appeared 300 million years ago, had already lost its wings and that stick insects re-evolved the structures at least four times (see graphic). The study covers only 14 of the 19 known sub-families of phasmids, so it is possible that wings reappeared even more often.
Beyond repair Researchers assumed wings could not come back once lost as the genes needed to create them would mutate beyond repair once the wings disappeared. But Whiting says there is evidence from the fruit fly Drosophila that the same genes contain instructions for forming wings and legs.
If the same were true for stick insects, there would be an evolutionary pressure to stop wing genes from mutating, even in the insects that did not have wings. Those genes could then be turned back on in the future.
Whiting says, however, that while wing re-evolution may seem unlikely to insect researchers, the basic idea of switching regulatory genes off and on is well accepted. Even a single gene can sometimes switch on the growth of a complex structure - studies indicate that a master gene called Pax-6, for example, might control the development of eyes in all creatures that have them.
So Whiting suggests that eyes too could have disappeared and reappeared in animals over time. "I remember sitting down with entomologists and hearing them say 'impossible, impossible, impossible'," he says. But "re-evolution is probably more common than we thought".
Journal reference: Nature (vol 421, p 264)
BTW, so you know since we were just discussing religion:
I believe that God, author of all history, is the author of the laws of the universe, prescient that through them He would create Man. I reject the nihilism and minimalism of some atheists who distort natural selection to infer that there exists no God watching over His Creation, or that the Spark of Consciousness within Man to create the Rational Soul is an insignificant event. I have no problem with the notion that Creation took more than 6x24 hours.
For all doctrines and morality, I'll defer to a literalist reading of Genesis, although I am uncomfortable with certain levels of trying to reconcile natural history with biblical history. I believe they are trying to answer two separate questions, and am unbothered if I don't understand how they reconcile. I refuse to draw inferences from science which challenge my morals. I believe I will called to account before God for my morals, but not my understanding of animal morphology. Since I do not believe in an unrational universe, I am content to advance the interest of science, confident that a reconciliation between science and faith is possible.
(regarding following, we do seem to be stuck in two thread warps ~ ) ~~~ strange unearthly music fills the void ~~~
Well, we know that brains seem to come and go in democrats
all the time...
God does love His critters doesn't He? Best be prepared.
Concerning those really old stories, I'm trying to figure out how the ancient rabbinical groups that kept the Pentatuch together managed to insert the Sargon story into the Mosaic tradition ~ had they lost their ability to read perfectly good Sumerian cuniform, or what?!
Well, there are mysteries all about ~ somebody with an understanding of the fundamental HOX gene structures might well illuminate us on the multiple uses of the parts that generate lungs, legs and wings, and is that just the front legs, or the back legs? Could explain why whales still have their front legs!
see there proof! LOL
Not to take you more seriously than you intended to be taken, but...
My understanding of Abraham is that he was born in about 2166. That means he would have left Ur while Sarkon was unifying his kingdom and suppressing the agrarian cultures that lived in the region, which fits perfectly biblical tellings of many stories, from the Garden of Eden at the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the motivation for Abraham seeking liberty in the desert.
But who "stole" from whom? The Jews, about 1500 years later, were forcibly returned to Sumeria, bearing with them stories similar to the ancient takes of Gilgamesh. The similarity would have jived with the Babylonian peasant's vague knowledge of their mythology. The Babylonian emporers would have had very strong motivation to merge the histories so their peoples didn't choose the much more vivid stories of the very fervent Jews over their own histories; it's my understanding that there is very little word-based ancient record of the Mesopotamian mythology prior to 700 AD.
A few trivial comments:
My mother's ancestors are Akkadian. Not Sumerian, but French, though... this Akkadia refers to the coastline of Maine (now called Acadia), and is where many French settlers dwelt before moving on towards New Orleans, where they became known by the locals as Akkadians, or, eventually, "Cajuns."
The Babylonian city of the warlords, which destroyed Eden, was known as Uruk. The forces of evil which destroyed the Edenic land of Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkein's neo-mythologies were known as the Uruk-Hai.
You are not a very happy person are you?
They went on to Virginia, then New York.
Now, about Sargon ~ that's his story ~ the one where Moses is pulled from the water. Independently of later Semitic stories in Babylon, the earlier Sumerian records cover it all quite well, although I think the original Sumerians were already in deep doo-doo by the time Abraham came along. Still, theirs appears to have been the original written language and it is beyond belief that Abraham and his followers would have abandoned writing to return to an oral tradition.
The Babylonian captivity period probably did force some serious reassessments of the content and sequences of the older materials.
Compared to what?
It just seems you are not very please with so many things!
I was hoping to read something you liked was made you smile!
Some love the smell of napalm in the morning, for example, and I love the chirping of the birds and watching the squirrels dig up acorns they planted a year before.
You should get a better computer based translator!
Well I read your profile and tried truly try to understand how you felt by the way you expressed those things, and it seem dreary...
but if you say it is not so than I am glad to know you are content!:)
The profile is just a snippet ~ not even a biography ~
On it's face, it's ridiculous.
It's time to start THINKING critically.
Can you point me to some sources establishing the antiquity of the Sumerian stories? My sources say there is a lack of such sources, but they may be very out of date (I understand that there has been many, many discoveries recently), or unduly skeptical of the authenticity of various finds and documents.
I MAY agree with you. But can you please tell me what you find so ridiculous? Simply proclaiming something ridiculous doesn't help achieve critical thinking.
Ping
http://www.crystalinks.com/sumerhistory.html has most of the basics concerning the earliest Sumerians.
One researcher has demonstrated that its nearest cognate languages are the 9 (or 11) Sa'ami languages, the very broad group of Dravidian languages, and one American Indian language spoken in California.
There's a book that's been out for years called "It all Began at Sumer". There are also researchers, et al, who step right off the planet when it comes to Sumer, so watch how you interpret what you're reading.
While that is an interesting history, I see nothing in it about the dating of extant archaeological artifacts of the Sumerian legends.
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